1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for information life cycle data storage management in a tiered storage area network.
2. Background Art
The storage area network (SAN) has become a necessity for virtually every sector of commerce where there is a requirement for storing data with high capacity, high speed, and increased reliability. SANs offers businesses a reduction in information technology costs in the management of storage data. SANs perform operations such as disk mirroring, data backup, data restoration, data archival, data retrieval, data migration between storage devices, and data sharing.
Typically, SANs interconnect data storage devices with respective user host computers that are usually configured as file servers; this configuration is called a host file system (HFS) SAN. HFS SANs use application software code to run on these host server computers to manage data storage. The software code resides and runs on the customer's host server which manages and migrates the data. However, when the software code resides and runs on the host computer server, it decreases the efficiency and capability of the host computer server.
Persistent storage device mediums come in different tiers or echelons of performance. High performance storage devices, like magnetic disk drives, are the most expensive and fastest. However, when large amounts of storage data that is rarely accessed and used is maintained on these top level storage devices, it can drastically waste the storage capacity and performance of the storage device and thus is not cost effective. Lower end performance storage devices, like tape drives, offer great capacity for storage at less cost, but offer slow performance speeds. Ideally, storage data that is rarely accessed and used would be stored on the lower end performance storage devices. Therefore, storage data that is accessed often and would require greater speed and reliability should reside on higher end storage devices like magnetic disk drives.
Thus there exists a need for a SAN data storage architecture that imposes minimal execution burden on customer hosts for file system metadata and event acquisition. The SAN management application code does not reside or run on the customer host server and can be kept outside of the customer host server to optimize the host computer server performance.
Furthermore, there also exists a need for uniform information lifecycle management of user files spanning a disparate collection of file systems. The user desires the ability to manage data outside of the host computer with greater uniformity, flexibility and precision using lifecycle management of information.
Effective management of the tiers of storage devices is desired for maximum optimization of the storage devices. These tiers of storage can be managed more efficiently with an information lifecycle management method and system. Savings can be realized when using the storage devices to run at optimum efficiency.